counting words

 I’ve been writing for a long time, I probably took it (and myself, unfortunately) very seriously when I was around nineteen or twenty years old and I thought I’d write the next big Canadian novel. I never got anywhere with it during that time, but I wrote daily because I was young and I had a lot of time on my hands. Looking back, the stuff I wrote was pretty bad, but I’m glad I was able to at least not give up on it.

 As I got older, the writing slowed down a little but I still wrote every day. Then I read Stephen King’s On Writing like millions of other people and read that he hits a certain word count daily and I felt like I should be more “on it” in regards to word count.

So, for a very long time, I would not let myself rest unless I’d hit the 1,000 word mark. This was despite having a full time job and family commitments and what ended up happening was that it became a massive chore for me to do and any fun that I got out of it was drained away.

I also became quite hard on myself about it and really felt like I wasn’t a “real” writer unless I was hitting that particular word count every single day. It got so that I was just writing things to check the word count and the result was I’d go back and delete most of it anyway.

I don’t remember when I decided to stop doing this, there wasn’t really any kind of big moment or anything, it just became less and less important to me as I got older.

What has worked for me is writing things down in a notebook on some days and then on others sitting down with the laptop and taking a look at what I’ve written down. Some days I’ll get a couple of hundred words, sometimes a thousand, sometimes fifty, it’s all over the place but I feel the most important thing is that I’ve stopped beating myself over the head about it. Writing by hand has helped, because there’s no machine to count the words, and sometimes I’ll just write a synopsis of the novel over and over again and for the past two novels this little activity has helped me form better ideas. Sometimes I’ll just focus on one scene, like yesterday, I wanted to describe an abandoned gas station so I just looked at some images of an abandoned gas station and wrote everything down that I could. This equated to maybe two hundred words and that was enough for me for the day. None of this is rocket science or breaking new ground, I’m just reflecting on how badly I treated myself about word count and how little it matters in my opinion (deadlines are a different story, I suppose). My advice with word count is it’s fine if you don’t write every day, my approach has been to try to jot down by hand a few things daily and then go to the laptop a couple of times a week to take a look at what I’ve written down. In the end, don’t beat yourself up about word count.